When your best just isn’t good enough: the Kindle Fire HD

Buying Amazon's 7-inch tablet? Get ready to overlook some flaws.

Internals: Processor speed, storage, battery life

The Kindle Fire is frustrating in no small part because the Amazon Appstore is a bit barren, especially in terms of benchmarking and performance apps. Running a device through benchmarks can produce a limited view of a device's user experience, but we really miss the opportunity for objective measurement. Still, we do the best we can below.

Given that the Multiple In/Multiple Out (MIMO) WiFi technology is supposed to be one of the big improvements to the Kindle Fire HD, it pained us to not be able to get a good handle on how well the dual antennas work with benchmarks. We could only get a rough idea from an app we downloaded from Amazon's store named Network Monitor Mini, which parked a download/upload meter in the upper corner of the screen. With this as our guide, we never saw the download speed crack 6Mbps on the 2.4GHz band when various other gadgets and computers on our Internet connection were pulling down over 17Mbps on SpeedTest.net (or in SpeedTest's app, as the case may be). The Kindle Fire HD hovered around 1.5–2Mbps upload, which was about the limit of our connection. The improvisational methodology of this test renders its results unreliable for more than a quick estimation, as far as we're concerned, and we're disappointed that either developers don't see fit to put their tools on the app store, or that Amazon isn't allowing them in there. The best we can say is that the antennas work; we can't really prove how well.

SunSpider is about the only benchmark we can get on the Kindle Fire HD, since it's browser-based. The device scores just shy of 1800ms, about 50ms slower than the Nexus 7. As we noted in the iPad 2 review, JavaScript benchmarks are not all-encompassing measures of how well the browser performs, and a good implementation can overstate the case for an otherwise shoddy browser, or vice versa. Generally, we found the browser to not be quite as "snappy" as the Nexus 7's browser.

The Kindle Fire HD's internals aren't exactly mind-blowing: 1GB of RAM and a dual-core 1.2GHz OMAP-4460 processor. There is a version of Linpack for Android available on Amazon's Appstore, but it appears to be old, as it can't run multi-threaded tests. The Kindle Fire HD scored 49–52 MFLOPS regularly, much better than its predecessor's 37 MFLOPS and about on track with the Nexus 7's single-threaded performance. Again, though, while the numbers seem to stack up, we just don't see similar levels of performance in real-world tasks.

The one spec that the base Kindle Fire HD holds unequivocally over the Nexus 7's head is storage. Bezos grandstanded at length about how an HD device needs plenty of space to store movies and other content locally—a bit rich coming from someone who released the Kindle Fire last year with a meager 6GB of usable storage and relied on The Cloud to make up for any deficiencies. Still, we're not going to complain about the bump to 16GB. The Nexus 7, by contrast, comes with 8GB for $199, or 16GB for $249 (likewise, the Kindle Fire HD can be further upgraded to 32GB for another $50). We're not sure an 8GB difference would make anyone choose one device over another, as even 16GB isn't very much when it comes to HD content. Still, Google's device comes up short here by comparison.

We tested out the same battery scenarios on the Kindle Fire HD as we did on the Nexus 7, with a combination of brightness and volume settings, airplane mode, and various activities. Amazon makes the bold claim that the Kindle Fire HD's 4400 mAh battery will last "over 11 hours" regardless of whether you're reading, surfing the Web on WiFi, watching video, or listening to music. Amazon didn't provide parameters for the tests which would result in eleven hours of battery life, but in tests of our own design, we rarely managed to coax eleven hours out of the device.

Turning off connectivity didn't have a huge effect on the battery performance, getting us only about 6 hours. Perhaps combining airplane mode and middling brightness and volume settings (which still let the device be plenty bright and plenty loud, as we noted earlier) will get you those 11 hours.

Your mileage will vary in this use case, as the battery life will depend on how frequently you load webpages or download files, and how intensive they are. But in our case, the battery lasted around 9.5 hours.

E-reading: WiFi/Bluetooth off (airplane mode), 50 percent brightness

Finally, we hit "over 11 hours," with the Kindle Fire HD lasting for just over 12 hours while e-reading with modest settings. Again, your own experience may vary with page turning frequency.

"Customers who bought this item also bought..."

Jeff Bezos told the Associated Press that Amazon would be "fine" if Kindle Fire HD customers don't buy content on the devices. The Kindle-Fire-as-content-vector certainly doesn't hurt Amazon, especially given that the company cleared a meager $7 million in net income on sales of $12.83 billion for the second quarter of 2012.

We don't doubt that the Kindle Fire HD is a higher margin item than the Nexus 7, given its less-expensive processor and chunkier body. However, to say that Amazon doesn't expect people to buy content on the Kindle Fire, which functions as a content consumption device better than it does anything else, seems a bit disingenuous. Furthermore, Bezos' stance that Amazon will be fine if customers skip buying content doesn't track with his emphasis on the importance of Amazon's services when he first presented the Kindle Fire HDs to the world.

There are more abstract reasons Amazon may think it doesn't need to worry about the profitability of the Kindle Fire HD. Special Offers, for one—there's a lot to be said for an ad that displays every time someone picks up the device (though Amazon has decided to allow customers to buy their way out of those screens). But if Bezos is playing it cool about users buying content, the Kindle Fire OS sure isn't: a marketing strip of context-relevant materials is displayed below most carousel items, and certain content libraries are always buried below the relevant content store.

The message may be muddled, but even though Amazon's leadership doesn't seem care if you see the Kindle Fire HD as a content consumption device, it is very clear that the Kindle Fire HD presents itself that way.

Every time you enter the videos tab, you see the store first, not your own library.

We'd go so far as to say that if you're not getting a Kindle Fire HD specifically to interact with Amazon's purchasable content, you might be a little annoyed at the way it behaves. The device is certainly not a neutral party in that regard, and Amazon's stuff is going to be in your face a lot of the time. We have less trouble considering this new iteration of Fire a "tablet" than we did before. Finally, it has Bluetooth; finally, it can do a reasonable imitation of e-mail. However, we return to our tablet-as-blank-slate argument and find that the Kindle Fire HD acts a little too much like an ongoing Amazon advertisement for our tastes. There aren't innumerable times when you're confronted with stuff to buy, but there are enough that we took notice.

If you can look past that aspect, the Kindle Fire HD improves over the first Fire in many ways, and it's a capable device—sometimes slow on the uptake, sometimes choppy, by no means unusable. Unfortunately, good isn't good enough when the Nexus 7 is out there winning hearts and minds without unusual design elements like the carousel or an ever-present row of Things To Buy on the home screen. The Nexus 7 is also faster, has better battery life and a more robust app store, and has access to most of the same content—save the free streamable videos that come with an Amazon Prime account on the Kindle Fire HD.

We were excited to see a worthy 7-inch tablet with the launch of the Nexus 7, and hoped to see some lively competition in the segment. With its vault of services underpinning the financial viability of a cheap tablet, Amazon is perfectly positioned to present such a competitor. Unfortunately, the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD isn't it.